At the conclusion of the Michigan State Championship we were really excited to have completed a perfect Co-Op score at that event. So that got me thinking how many teams have completed a perfect Co-Op score at an event this season?

I did some research and was surprised that only 8 teams have accomplished this*:

I was ok with coop bridge too, compared with coopertition elements of past games, this one was better. I didn't really like coopertition via minibot sharing last year, as it was almost impossible to do and it wasn't really organized. However, I felt that there was a major improvement this year. I hope that if FIRST continues to add coopertition elements to its games that this improvement continues.

If 1089 got a perfect coop score at MAR regional, then I think 708 did too, as we won the Coopertition award.

Perfect co-op score does not get you the coopertition award...there is a formula that is used. I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I believe it is (twice your coopertition points) - (qualification points)

For example: in West MI we went 12 for 12 in co-op for 24 co-op points. Twice that is 48. We ended up with 41 qualification points, so our coopertition award total was 7. We were edged out by another team who had fewer, but still very high, co-op points, but not as many qualification points.

Perfect co-op score does not get you the coopertition award...there is a formula that is used. I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I believe it is (twice your coopertition points) - (qualification points)

The above is correct. The interesting thing about the formula is that since coopertition points are included in the qualification points, the formula "reduces" to the below:

(coopertition points) - (Win/Loss/Tie points)

So, basically, the coopertition award goes to the team which has the biggest positive difference between their coopertition points and their W/L/T points. Another way of thinking of this is that the coopertition award goes to the team which has a "coopertition record" which is the most better than their W/L/T record. As such, the award will typically go to a team with a relatively weak W/L/T record but a very good coopertition record. Another interesting corollary to this, is that for any teams with the same coopertition record, the one which would get the coopertition award would be the lowest-seeded of those teams!

I think the rationale for having the award may be that the team winning this award is more likely to have been in matches where their alliance focused on coopertition, rather than winning the match -- particularly to the point where they would lose matches because of the focus on getting the coopertition bridge balanced.

However, in practice, I wonder whether or not the recipients of the coopertition award actually tended to be teams which were themselves usually on the coopertition bridge, or whether the teams receiving the award tended to be semi-random "statistical variations" from the qualification match schedule? I have been curious to know if this was the case, but haven't asked our scouting team to go through our collected data from the two regionals we attended to see if the coopertition award recipients were actually robots which themselves frequently balanced on the coopertition bridge.

I would have liked to see the Coopertition Award go to the team that makes the most effective use of the center bridge WHILE ALSO playing competitively. Not INSTEAD OF playing competitively. So I think the best way to recognize coopertition would have been to give the award to the team with the most co-op points, using seed rank as the tie breaker.

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)

I also like the way that the Coopertition Award is scored, but they ARE announcing the award improperly. At the MAR championships, when giving the award, they stated something to the effect that the award is given to the team with the greatest number of Coopertition Points, but that was incorrect.

By the rules, 708 clearly won the award, with a calculated score of 15 points (1168 had 14 points, and the next highest was a many-way tie of 10). Congratulations on it!

That said, the reward given for the most coopertition points is obviously a higher seed. There were significantly better robots than ours that placed much lower than us because they did not have the opportunity to cooperate as much as we did. Since we were a slightly-above-average shooter who could balance very well, we were able to win a lot of matches via game strategy, and we were able to secure a higher rank by talking to our opponents before the match and agreeing to cooperate with a team we know who could do it. Thus, good communication and scouting impacted our rankings more than our robot itself.

I thought that the effect of coopertition points on the rankings was definitely powerful, and as clear in our case, made it MORE possible that the best robots were not always the highest seeds.

That said, I am curious as to how much the Coopertition Score system has on strength-of-schedule impacting the rankings.

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Chris G
Advisor, Team Mercury (1089), Hightstown High School